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Friday, January 18, 2013

Create Multimedia Booklets With Simple Booklet

This week someone asked me if I knew of a free tool that students can use to take the content of Word documents and put them into an ebook format. That question prompted me to review Simple Booklet again. Simple Booklet is a service offering free online booklet creation and publishing.

To create a book using Simple Booklet just
sign-up for a free account and click create. Select the layout template
that suits your needs. To add content click anywhere on the blank
canvas and a menu of options will appear. You can add text, images,
audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet. In the field for adding text there is an option to copy from Word documents.

Each page of your Simple Booklet
can have multiple elements on it. To include videos you can upload your
own files or select from a variety of provides including SchoolTube,
TeacherTube, YouTube, and others. To add audio to your pages you can
upload your own files or again select from the online hosts Last.fm,
Sound Cloud, or Mix Cloud. When you're done building pages in your Simple Booklet you can share it online by embedding it into a webpage or you can share the unique link generated for your booklet.

Applications for Education
Simple Booklet offers a free plan. You can register on the site or use your Google Account to register for Simple Booklet. Simple Booklet now offers a very reasonable plan for educators who want to create and manage student accounts. For $5/year teachers can create and manage student accounts.

Simple Booklet could be a good
tool for students to use to publish multimedia stories. Students could
use Simple Booklet to create a small portfolio of their work using
videos, images, sounds, and text.